The Washington Post has backtracked on its claim that nine major tech firms 'participate knowingly' in the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program, Jon Russell of The Next Web reports.
But that doesn't mean that the dragnet snooping didn't happen, or that the tech heavyweights don't know that the government can intercept their data.
On Thursday The Post and The Guardian reported on leaked NSA powerpoint slides that detail an eavesdropping program — dubbed PRISM — based on "legally-compelled collection" of extracting reams of data from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple with the "assistance of communications providers in the U.S."
The Post article now suggests the firms were unaware of PRISM after Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google denied involvement, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper declassified information about the program to address "inaccuracies."
From Russell:
... the paper’s new stance is a huge admission. For one thing, it adds to the growing claim that the agency instead accessed the information indirectly. In such a case, the most likely method would be via ISPs or mobile operators, but that remains unconfirmed.
Actually, according to investigative reporting and whistleblower testimony, it's pretty clear that the NSA has bugged the major ISP and mobile providers.
Last year James Bamford of Wired — who wrote the book "The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America" — reported that the NSA hired secretive companies linked to Israeli intelligence to establish 10 to 20 wiretapping rooms at key Internet Service Provider (ISP) telecommunication points throughout the country.
In 2004 AT&T engineer Mark Klein discovered that a special NSA network actively "vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T,"emphasizing that "much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic."
NSA whistleblowers William Binney and Thomas Drake corroborated Klein's assertions: Binney contends that the NSA analyzes the information "to be able to monitor what people are doing" and who they are doing it with while Drake maintains that the NSA is using Israeli-made NARUS hardware to "seize and save all personal electronic communications."
On Wednesday night Glenn Greenwald revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) is secretly using the so-called "business records" provision of the Patriot Actto collect telephone records of millions of Americans from Verizon.
Greenwald noted that "previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks," which was best illustrated by this ACLU infographic graphic illustrating how the NSA intercepts more than a billion electronic records and communications every day.
And there are several indications that tech giants knew that the government was siphoning off data from ISPs.
The most obvious is that fact that Eric Lichtblau and James Risen of the New York Times won a Pulitzer-Prize for this 2005 story:
As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.
Specifically, in January Google released a transparency report detailing the government's use of controversial legislation that bypasses judicial approval to access the online information of private citizens.
Also in January privacy advocates urged Microsoft to disclose details about the government's efforts to access Skype user communications and data.
In May 2011 Microsoft took control of Skype and subsequently expanded its cooperation with U.S. authorities to make online chats and user information more available to authorities.
Given the fact that the CIA's recently visited tech conference to detail the Agency's vision for collecting and analyzing all of the information people put on the Internet, it would be naïve to think that American tech giants hasn't know that all their data belongs to NSA.
SEE ALSO: CIA Chief Tech Officer: Big Data Is The Future And We Own It
Some context: DID YOU KNOW?: Two Secretive Israeli Companies Reportedly Bugged The US Telecommunications Grid For The NSA
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